For homes · San Francisco
San Francisco Smart Home, Without the Dealer: Condos, Victorians, and One Screen
San Francisco homes break the assumptions most smart home packages are built on. Condos have boards and shared walls. Victorians have plaster, old wiring, and not a single spare conduit. And almost nobody wants new holes in a 120-year-old wall. This is a practical walk through what actually works in SF housing stock, what to be careful about, and what changes when the goal is a system you own rather than a dealer platform you rent.
The condo problem: what the HOA actually controls
In a condo or TIC, the working rule is simple: inside your unit and wireless is usually yours to decide; anything that penetrates a shared wall, touches common systems, or changes the building's exterior usually needs the board. That rule sorts the whole project for you. Smart lighting that replaces switches inside your unit, plug-in sensors, a thermostat swap on your own furnace, cameras inside your own door: generally yours. A camera in the common hallway, wiring through the garage, a dish on the roof: that is a letter to the board, and the answer is often no.
The good news is that the parts you control are the parts that matter most day to day: lighting, climate, leak sensing under your own sinks and water heater, and seeing it all in one place. A system designed around no-new-wiring components stays entirely on your side of the line.
Victorians and Edwardians: respect the walls
Older SF houses deserve two cautions. First, the walls: lath and plaster does not forgive exploratory holes the way drywall does, and fishing new cable through balloon framing is real work that should be priced honestly, not hand-waved. Second, the wiring: if parts of the house still run on very old circuits, anything touching line voltage belongs with a licensed electrician, and some older wiring should be evaluated before smart dimmers go anywhere near it. Neither caution means "no smart home." It means the retrofit should lean wireless-first: smart switches and dimmers where circuits are modern, plug-in and battery devices where they are not, and new wire only where it genuinely earns its place.
What "no new wiring" gets you in practice
A surprising amount. Modern retrofit gear covers lighting (switch and dimmer swaps, or plug-in), climate, leak sensors at the usual failure points, cameras where you actually need them, and energy monitoring at the panel. A fog-belt reality check belongs here too: solar behaves differently across SF microclimates, and if you have it, the useful first step is seeing production and usage honestly on one screen before deciding anything else.
The dealer question, SF edition
The standard high-end path is a dealer-programmed system: capable, and locked. Changes go through the dealer, the programming lives with the dealer, and if the relationship ends, you inherit a system nobody can modify. We wrote up what that lock-in actually costs and what to do if it has already happened to you. The owned alternative flips the structure: your hardware, open protocols where they exist, and a console you keep, with everything in your own accounts. In a city where housing is old, buildings have rules, and people move, owning the brains of your own home is not a philosophy. It is just less fragile.
One screen, whatever the building is
The console we build puts everything the home runs on a single owned screen: lighting, climate, water and leaks, cameras, solar and battery if you have them, and the running of the place itself. It is built on the hardware you already have where that hardware exposes an interface, and the honest generalization is: if it has an API, a meter, or a schedule, it can live on the screen. It runs today on a real home across the bridge in Marin (the full stack is written up here, with a live demo you can click), and we serve San Francisco. Base builds start at $2,500 flat, with per-system pricing published on the main page. For the SF-specific service picture, there is also our San Francisco page.
Everything you run. One screen.
Honesty notes: always confirm your own HOA's rules in your CC&Rs before buying anything; boards differ. Line-voltage work belongs with a licensed electrician, and we design and integrate rather than install line voltage. The systems named as live (Lutron, Sol-Ark, Flume, Ring, Tesla) run on a real Marin home as of July 2026; presence sensing and the AI layer are in development. Our prices are published at headlandsconsole.com. This article is meant to be useful even if you never hire anyone.